5 Incorporating Your Mail

This chapter talks about getting mail from your system mailbox into
your MH ‘+inbox’ folder. The following command accomplishes that
and is found in the ‘Folder’ menu.

i

Incorporate new mail into a folder (mh-inc-folder).

The following options in the ‘mh-inc’ customization group are
used.

mh-inc-prog

Program to incorporate mail (default: "inc").

mh-inc-spool-list

Alternate spool files (default: nil).

The following hook is available.

mh-inc-folder-hook

Hook run by mh-inc-folder after incorporating mail into a
folder (default: nil).

If at any time you receive new mail, incorporate the new mail into
your ‘+inbox’ buffer with i (mh-inc-folder). Note
that i will display the ‘+inbox’ buffer, even if there
isn't any new mail. You can incorporate mail from any file into the
current folder by specifying a prefix argument; you'll be prompted for
the name of the file to use as well as the destination folder (for
example, C-u i ~/mbox <RET> +tmp <RET>).

Emacs can notify you when you have new mail by displaying ‘Mail’
in the mode line. To enable this behavior, and to have a clock in the
mode line as well, add the following to ~/.emacs:

(display-time)

The name of the program that incorporates new mail is stored in
mh-inc-prog; it is "inc" by default. This program
generates a one-line summary for each of the new messages. Unless it
is an absolute pathname, the file is assumed to be in the
mh-progs directory (see Getting Started). You may also link
a file to inc that uses a different format (see
‘mh-profile’(5), and sections
Reading Mail: inc show next prev and MH Format Strings in
the MH book). You'll then need to modify several variables
appropriately (see Scan Line Formats).

You can use the mh-inc-spool-list variable to direct MH-E to
retrieve mail from arbitrary spool files other than your system
mailbox, file it in folders other than your ‘+inbox’, and assign
key bindings to incorporate this mail.

Suppose you are subscribed to the mh-e-devel mailing list and you
use procmail to filter this mail into ~/mail/mh-e
with the following recipe in .procmailrc:

In order to incorporate ~/mail/mh-e into ‘+mh-e’ with an
I m (mh-inc-spool-mh-e) command, customize this option,
and click on the ‘INS’ button. Enter a ‘Spool File’ of
‘~/mail/mh-e’, a ‘Folder’ of ‘mh-e’, and a ‘Key
Binding’ of ‘m’.

You can use xbuffy to automate the incorporation of this
mail using the Emacs 23 command emacsclient as follows:

You can set the hook mh-inc-folder-hook, which is called after
new mail is incorporated by the i (mh-inc-folder)
command. A good use of this hook is to rescan the whole folder either
after running M-x mh-rmail the first time or when you've changed
the message numbers from outside of MH-E.